Naples Comes To Northleach

The takeaway woes of the soggy brown bag are no more as a pizza explosion hits the Cotswolds

- Adam Edwards

Of all the guff that is written about the pluses of moving to the countryside there is one minus that is rarely, if ever, highlighted – the dearth of a decent takeaway. It’s all very well waxing lyrical about a slow cooked stew from the Aga but real bucolic luxury is a foil carton of Lamb Jalfrezi with its accompanying mean polythene bag of damp salad. A homemade game pie maybe a rustic delight, but I for one would happily swap it for a paper carrier containing Mixed Starters for Two and a couple of chopsticks of Special Fried Rice.

Two decades ago my move from London to the Cotswolds wrenched me from the takeaway. Any lingering effort to continue my urban eating habit was blighted by the six-mile drive to Cirencester, the deadening wait with a well-thumbed copy of the Sun, the brown bag of food that spilt in the foot-well of the car, the breakneck return, and finally the lukewarm fare whose feeble temperature, once home, made it joyless. It is true that over the years the occasional fast food flyer has arrived in my postbox with the promise of hot grub, but long before I could complete the necessary details for the delivery boy to find my secluded corner of the Cotswolds, a hamlet with no streetlights and no visible house names, the phone would go dead.